Presented by the Moonstone Arts Center & The Nick Virgilio Haiku Association

at Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street

Sunday June 17, 2018 – 2pm

Philadelphia Says Haiku

Celebrating the release of

Philadelphia Says Haiku,

an Anthology of Haiku by Philadelphia Area Poets

 ($10, The Moonstone Press) with a reading by contributors.

Philadelphia is home to Sonia Sanchez, who writes a Haiku every morning and worked with Mural Arts on the Peace is a Haiku song mural, exploring haiku as a vehicle for peace and transformation. Sonia gives herself over with deep pleasure to the exacting beauty of haiku, a form she has cherished her entire writing life. Their brevity seems built for speed, but their lyricism and warmth inspire lingering, savoring, reading, and rereading, perhaps aloud. African-American novelist Richard Wright, in his final years, composed some 4,000 haiku, 817 of which are collected in the volume Haiku: This Other World. Wright hewed to a 5-7-5 syllabic structure for most of these pieces. In current English language haiku, most successful poems have fewer than fourteen syllables.

The Nick Virgilio Writers House opened in Camden on April 28, 2018, in honor of the city’s second best-known poet. Virgilio was one of America’s pre-eminent writers of haiku, known for his prolific work in the traditional Japanese short-poetry format and admired for upsetting its stringent rules. The Nick Virgilio Haiku Association was founded in 1990 to keep alive Nick Virgilio’s artistic legacy and to promote literacy and self-expression among young people through all forms of writing, especially haiku.

Mr. Virgilio is one of the acknowledged masters who in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s brought the delicate art of Japanese haiku into the English language. He died January 3, l989, while taping a segment of Nightwatch.  At that time, according to Cor van den Heuvel, a Newsweek poetry editor and author of The Haiku Anthology, Virgilio “…. was on the verge of becoming American haiku’s first celebrity.”

A haiku in English is a very short poem, following to a greater or lesser extent the form and style of the Japanese haiku. A typical haiku is a three-line observation about a fleeting moment involving nature.